Author: Vasim Samadji

Vasim Samadji is a partner at Flora Fountain, where he leads the Business and Marketing Strategy divisions. He is a seasoned professional with an MBA in marketing and over a decade of experience working with multiple MNCs. Vasim is a firm believer in the power of creation and he is passionate about cultivating innovative ideas, strategies and trends that shape both individuals and brands.

Armed with market research, digital marketing strategy and branding experience, Vasim has a deep understanding of the human psyche and its effect on consumer behaviour. He is skilled at selling the right product to its target audience at a price that makes both the seller and buyer happy. Vasim's vision for Flora Fountain is to build a community of free-thinkers who foster boundless creativity and bestow even the ordinary with a unique identity.

When not in his dapper suits, Vasim is a closeted poet and has also started an initiative called "An Evening With" which revolves around art of spoken words. He is a lifelong learner who is always eager to explore new ideas and challenges. So far Vasim has worked with more than 100 businesses for various needs and has made significant contributions to their success.

Categories
Social Media

Advertising on Social Media: Why you need a separate game plan

Advertising on Social Media

Who would have thought that the platforms created to let people share stories from their lives through pictures and videos would turn out to be such great tools for audiences to discover new products and services and for brands to find these new audiences. And the pandemic has only made it more so!

It is time to go deeper into the social media rabbit hole.

Social media marketing and social media advertising. Always knew they were different, but didn’t know who to ask? Read below for some insights from Ahmedabad’s best digital marketing agency!

First things first, social media marketing is purely organic activity, which involves posting pictures, publishing stories, responding to comments and inquiries on messages and sharing the posts in various groups and communication channels.

While social media advertising comprises all paid marketing activity on various social media platforms through the means of sponsored posts and boosts, done over and above the usual social media marketing activity such as posting and creating stories.

While there is an overlap between the two in terms of results and goals, advertising on social media is a different ball game altogether, with targeted budgets, a keener understanding of target audiences, and a smart selection of the content that should be boosted.

Because of the difference in strategy and skills required for the two, the top advertising agency in Ahmedabad suggests that a mere social media strategy or calendar does not cut it for a brand. Serious brands must have a separate game plan for the two. Read on to know why and everything else about social media advertising.

WHY ADVERTISE ON SOCIAL MEDIA

Social media advertising is an all-encompassing format of marketing for a brand. Since social media is a place where the people are a bit chilled out, it gives marketers the opportunity to go out of their way with creativity to make their brand stand out.

The regular advertising in the digital world includes the usual suspects, like pay-per-click ads, website display ads, video popup ads, digital billboards, etc. But social media has promotions and boosts, which offers them great flexibility in tweaking the audience, its reach perimeter, the budgets, and putting a pause or restart as per the brands requirements.

Even the best digital marketing agencies in India believe that organic reach is hard to achieve, hence if a brand has the bandwidth and resources to spend, they must consider social media advertising for quick win and turn around.

HOW TO ADVERTISE ON SOCIAL MEDIA

Different platforms have different ways to let businesses and individuals promote themselves and their services to a large swathe of potential customers with interests that align with what they sell.

Listed below are the various kinds of paid promotions a brand can run on different platforms.

Twitter Promotions

With Twitter Promote, the Twitter algorithm automatically promotes Tweets to the brand’s specified audience. It promotes the first 10 daily organic Tweets that pass the Twitter quality filter. It also promotes the brand account to attract new followers.

Marketeers can focus on up to 5 interests or metro locations, and let Twitter do the rest. Unfortunately, with this feature, marketers can’t choose which Tweets to promote. (That’s why creating great content on a regular basis for every platform is important).

Facebook Ads


Facebook Ads
With over 2.45 billion monthly active users, Facebook is popular across many demographics. Just as many teenagers use Facebook as their parents—and seniors are quickly catching up. With ads, brands can direct users to its Facebook Page or the website as a part of the sales funnel. One such great form of advertising is Carousel ads on Facebook timelines.

Carousel ads work well to showcase different features of a product, or to explain a step-by-step process. They’re also a great way to present multiple products or services.


Showcase a Variety of Products
Sometimes, brands can showcase a variety of products in a single carousel chain, and every picture can have a customised purchase or inquiry link. This way, it can not only be a great sales and data collection tool too.

Instagram Promotions

Instagram is most popular with millennials, they say. Well, this platform is popular with people of all generations. Instagram has millions of Gen Z and GenX too, who create and consume content in the form of posts, reels, videos and stories.

Instagram currently has over 1 billion active users, a large majority of them using the app on their mobile phones. What’s interesting is that 71% of their demographic are users who are under the age of 35, who spend an average 53 minutes per day.

And what more, post the pandemic, where online sales have taken off and crossed the stratosphere already, it was found out that 80% of consumers use Instagram to help them decide on a purchase.

Just like Facebook, brands can target their ideal viewers with customised targeting options. Create lookalike audiences, define the audience’s behaviors and activities, interests, and demographics.

Seen above is a great example of a carousel ad on Instagram, that blends in smartly with the other content on the feed of the Instagram users.

Instagram Promotions

YouTube Promotions

Let us start by sharing a startling fact about this video streaming giant. YouTube is the second most visited site on the internet, and netizens consume close to 6 hours of video content every day.

Advertising on YouTube requires a Google Ads account, using which it uniformly helps brands create ads on multiple spots on the YouTube streaming page.


YouTube Promotions
The different types of ads on YouTube include short clips that play before the actual video, banner ads that get displayed on top of the playlist and clickable links that display in the corners of the screen.

Brands can set their budget and target the desired audience on specific YouTube channels. There’s no minimum price to run an ad – and brands can change their ads, targeting and budgets at any time.

LinkedIn Boosts

LinkedIn is much more business-oriented than other social networks in this post. It offers targeting options based on professional qualifications like job title and seniority.

Single images, videos, or carousel ads are all different options for sponsored content advertising on LinkedIn.


LinkedIn Boosts
Brands that are looking to target talented individuals to join their workforce, hiring agencies that have a large number of positions to fill, or companies who wish to talk about their achievements and attract more followers whose interests align with their brand, ideally choose LinkedIn Boosts. It has been noted that boosting on LinkedIn costs way more than its peers.

Get started with Flora Fountain

The team of experienced digital advertising and social media marketing experts at Flora Fountain have paved the path to success for many local and national brands to tap into a large swathe of unexplored audiences online, especially on social media.

Drop us a line here and let us invite you over for a cup of coffee and a riveting conversation on your brand’s future online.

Categories
Social Media

The ultimate guide to LAUNCH a product on social media

Social Media

Remember the last time you scrolled through your Instagram feed and thought “Hey, how did they know I was looking for this sneaker/hoodie/blender/fill in the blanks?” More and more people are discovering new products and services online through social media, over traditional methods of discovery like TV ads, newspaper ads, hoardings and billboards. And this is even more true after the pandemic, with an increasing population comfortable spending time and money online.

So it is imperative, when a brand has a new product ready for launch, to create a big buzz online. Brands have to get people curious about the product and the idea behind it. However, with over 3.6 billion people active on various social media platforms, spending an average of 2.5 hours every day scrolling and messaging, there are chances of a brand’s messaging getting lost in the din and noise made by almost everybody online.

So here’s the ultimate cheat sheet (or guide, if you will) created by India’s top social media marketing agency, Flora Fountain, to make some noise, stand out and attract the right eyeballs for a new product or brand launch online.

1. First thing first, Identify the audience

The first thing a brand must do before planning a new product or starting any form of marketing activity for its launch, is to understand “WHAT DOES THE MARKET WANT?” and “WHERE DO WE FIND THIS AUDIENCE”

It starts with market research, where the ideal customer is identified based on various demographic points like age, gender, interests, income, region, etc. It can start from something as simple as a Google search of a product similar to the one about to be launched by the brand. Simply going through the kind of people that the competition brands are addressing through their content, images, and the reviews on their shopping platforms can give a rough idea about the ideal customer.

If the product is targeted towards young people in their 20s who love following trends, then Instagram is the place to find them (well, isn’t everyone on Instagram now!). If the product is more service-based, priced higher and is targeted at a somewhat older audience, Facebook can be the place to target such an audience. If the target is business communities, or art lovers, or musicians, there is a platform for these too. But it all starts with knowing who the product, service, brand or idea is meant for: the OG TG.

2. Plan out the online content calendar

Ray Ethnic Fashion Brand

Having a launch timeline is very important for the brand to chart out every move, every post on the various digital platforms it is active on. While it may sound like a task as easy as taking a picture and posting it on Instagram, Facebook or Pinterest with a caption stating check out our newly launched collection, it is way more than that…

Think about it, the product pictures needs to be clicked, they have to be named (if not done), banners and creatives for website pages and posts are to be made, captions as per the platform (hashtag heavy for Instagram, long yet linked for Facebook and short and sweet for Pinterest)

are to be written, promotional email drafts have to be created, SEO work is to be done, special social media promotional content for boosts are to be made… Phew!

Yeah, that’s right… All that, apart from the regular, in-store or outdoor marketing campaigns. Here’s a look at how Ray Ethnic, an Ahmedabad-based ethnic fashion brand recently planned their product launch. Simple, minimalistic & to the point.

Plan out every piece of content that will go online, from the teaser to the launch to the product showcase. Yes, it takes time, but then actual work becomes a piece of cake.

3. Start creating a buzz

Social media is such a powerful tool, it is scalable, cost effective, provides great creative freedom to experiment, and the best part: The people are there, online!

And one of the best ways to get started with the promotions is by generating curiosity among the people online, on platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and even LinkedIn (if the brand has an audience there).

Start with Coming Soon posts like these:

Give the viewers a sneak peek on how the product is going to look like, what it is for, why it is unique, etc. This is kind of teasing the customer, by showing parts or some element of the product as a preview and why they should look forward to it.

Coming Soon Posts

Next, you can create countdown posts that usually say, ‘2 Days to Go’, ‘1 Day to Go’, etc. These kinds of promotional content create a sense of anticipation among the followers and the customers and they stay tuned with the brand page on social media.

And finally, post the launch, a giveaway or a contest can be run through specially created posts to boost up the engagement on the page. Wondering why? Because when the page gets maximum engagement, the posts are visible on the Explore and Suggestion sections of non-following people online who may have similar tastes in the product.

4. Get creative with hashtags

Another great way to make waves around the social media about an impending launch is by creating a unique hashtag which gives a hint of the product and the brand, while leaving the users and followers guessing on what it could be.

While creating a launch hashtag, these three points should be kept in mind:

  • It should be precise
  • Don’t combine more than 3-4 words together
  • Try to write it in Title case, to make it easy to understand

By creating a hashtag, they instantly highlight the content that’s related to the launch and reinforces the brand identity. Further, it helps followers to tag, share and participate in the launch activities and post pictures of their own which are connected with the brand.

5. Make the splash: The launch

The launch has to be timed in such a manner that the product/s must get revealed on all social media platforms at the same time. This is where the advance content planning as mentioned in the first point, comes of great help.

Since Instagram and Facebook both fall under the same entity, it is easier to plan and schedule posts around a specific time, using custom content, hashtags, CTAs, etc. While Facebook has its own Creator Studio platform to manage Instagram and Facebook pages, there are other third party platforms like Later and Hootsuite for LinkedIn, Google Business and Tweetdeck for Twitter.

Creator Studio platform

Flora Fountain, one of the best social media agencies in Ahmedabad suggests that brands should ideally boost these launch posts for maximum visibility and opportunity to showcase their products to newer audiences. While it is simple to create an Ad Account using Facebook Business or AdSense for Google platforms, it is advised to get the top digital marketing agency on board to share the burden of tracking, analysing and strategising these paid promotions online.

OR

Plan a staggered launch
Unlike the one time big splash launch, a staggered launch is done by revealing the products one after the other or as batches, in stages. The rollout of the products can go on for weeks together instead of putting everything out for sale on the launch day.

Remember how smartphone giant Apple launched the iPhone 12 in two stages? While the original reason behind this exercise was the supply chain disruption due to the global smart-chip shortage, the marketing teams of the brand decided to launch the smaller versions of phone in the first stage, and the bigger and pricier versions along with its upgraded version of accessories just in time for pre-christmas sales.

This way, brands can not only keep the conversation going, but also tap into multiple points of high sales, like the festival and holiday seasons.

6. Have your analytics in place

Instagram Reach

The true success of a launch or really any digital activity lies in the data. A brand should have the tools to identify the right metrics, evaluate the various milestones during the launch at regular intervals and then do a comparative study with its goals.

Before the launch, set up a cross-channel social media analytics dashboard using tools like Google Analytics, HubSpot or Sprout Social and connect the various platforms where the launch will take place,

i.e. Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn. Of course, each tool also has the inbuilt insights or metrics for views, clicks, conversions for brands to identify which piece of content and strategy and worked and what didn’t.

It allows tracking of various metrics like hashtag performance, region-wise visitor activity, post reach and engagement, etc. This way, brands can make informed decisions in terms of allocating budgets to campaigns, tweaking the target audience to ensure a successful launch.

Google Analytics Report

7. Keep the conversation going

Post launch, the brand must keep the momentum going through various forms of audience engagement. Because all that buzz generated post the legwork done to get the product launched, must not fizzle out in a week’s time.

Continue publishing content related to the product, the salient features about it, it’s availability online or offline, and how the response is (only if it is positive). Encourage followers and customers to tag the brand with their product and reshare them on the pages, giving the users some free publicity too.
Ray Ethnic Hits

Something again Ray Ethnic hits the nail right on the head with its popular post launch campaign #RayOnYou. Thanks to some smartly planned celebrity endorsement, now even regular customers post regularly with outfits purchased from Ray.

Always keep a close eye on your mentions and customer questions on the comments, respond to them within 24 hours, negative or positive. This will not only give the brand image a boost, but organically push the posts on the explore feeds of social media timelines too.

Now that you have the ultimate guide to the perfect social media launch, get started right away. Or, how about you let the experts do the job for you. Drop us a line on hello@flora.ffteam.in or click here.

Categories
Social Media

Captions That Captivate! 8 Tips to Write for Social Media

Graphic art showing social media captions

What attracts the attention of the viewer on social media?

  • A beautiful visual
  • A good photograph
  • A stunning design

But what results in an interaction on the post, a LIKE, a COMMENT, a DM (direct message) or a link click?
A captivating caption, something that delights the reader, generates curiosity in them, convinces them to read further and take action.

While sharing photos or creatives on social media, a well-written caption will set the tone for the post, inspire your followers, give value, spark discussion, and demonstrate the brand`s personality.

And here are some suggestions for creating a compelling caption and improving a brand`s social media marketing approach.

First impression is what lasts!

With people`s attention spans shrinking, a strong opening line will help you grab their attention. While you have the entire text box to narrate a story about the post, it is the first 50 characters that matter. Especially on Instagram, because people are going to click on the “Read more…” call out only if the first line leaves them intrigued and wanting for more.

Your captions should be a natural extension of your post. There must be a strong connection between the image and the caption. Never let a post get published without a copy or simply repeat what is written in the image copy, as your caption. A repetitive copy is as useless as a post with no caption.

Fulfill the intention

Your captions must fulfill the purpose behind the post. Before you write a caption, ask these questions to yourself: Are you trying to establish a connection with the target audience? Do you want them to take action after reading your caption? or are you simply showing off the brand`s personality through the writing.

If it is an action post, make sure you make it clear in the second or third line of your caption on what the reader needs to do.

“Click on the link in bio”
“Call 123456789 to know more”
“Share your thoughts in the comments below”

Graphic showing content writer thinking

These are some examples of Call To Action phrases to be used in captions.

Get them talking!

Create social media captions that elicit feedback and encourage your audience to comment on your post.
One of the simplest ways to increase the number of comments on your post is to ask a question. The questions don`t have to be difficult; they should be basic and simple.

Inviting your audience to submit their tips, reviews, and recommendations is a fantastic method to engage them. Because trust us, your users will not respond to you unless you ask them to.

Mind the language

While English might be the most commonly used language on social media, people engage with posts more when they see that the brand is addressing them in a language that they know and understand. Localisation is the key to strong engagement on social media.

Shilpa Lifestyle Hindi Content Post Sample

Keep in mind the language used by the target audience and try writing captions in the local lingo every once in a while. It will ensure that the audience reads your captions more often instead of simply scrolling away.

Here`s a look at how Flora Fountain, a social media marketing company in Ahmedabad taps into the regional audience engagement through captions in Gujarati and Hindi for their brands.

Align with the medium

Your post captions must align with the medium it is being posted on. For instance, a fun and quirky post with a cheeky caption will be a hit on Instagram, but kind of a turn-off on LinkedIn, where the audience is looking for informative, long-form content.

Craft your captions keeping your audience and medium in mind. Customize the length, tonality, and style of your captions as per the platform. Below are the caption character limits on the various social media platforms, they`ll come in handy the next time you write a caption for your post.

Instagram: 2200 characters
Facebook: 63,206 characters
Twitter: 280 characters
LinkedIn (Post): 3000 characters

Use Emojis

Emojis are cartoon-style emoticons that add character to your social media captions. Emojis can be used to draw the viewer`s attention to the post.

Emojis are completely universal because their meanings are understood in each country in the same way. And it`s a great tool for marketing, because if you think about it, you save money on translation, design, and the need to localise meaning for each region. They make captions for all industries more interesting and bring the eye to a halt mid-scroll.

In case you`re wondering how, what, where to find these emojis, Emojipedia`s got you covered! Or simply find them on your chat keyboard, they`re hard to miss!

Have a call to action!

Don`t forget to include a Call To Action where needed after all of your hard work. A CTA serves two distinct purposes: telling someone what they should do and motivating them to do it.

Incorporating a call to action into your caption is an excellent way to direct traffic to your website, landing pages, and blogs.

However, you are treading on thin ice; CTAs in every post may become jarring, so use CTAs sparingly and only when necessary.

Don`t forget hashtags!

It`s crucial to increase engagement, but your posts also need to reach a wider audience and attract new followers. You can strategically boost the reach of your post by using the proper and relevant hashtags.

Posts with a lot of hashtags get less interaction than those with just a few relevant ones. As a result, choose your winners with care.

Go ahead, get your creative juices flowing in the form of words on your social media. And if you are a brand or business who wishes to let the experts do the talking, drop us a line here!

Graphic of people working atop a giant hashtag
Categories
Branding Services Digital Marketing Agency

Turning businesses into brands: The case for a professional creative agency

coverimg

Any marketing agency out there can design hoardings, create logos or manage social media.

But what differentiates a brand from business?

Hard-to-miss presence in the market, on-point messaging to its exact audience and a knowledge of the brand even outside its demographic. These are the hallmarks of a brand. And this magic happens when a creative agency comes into the picture.

So how does a professional creative agency turn a business into a brand? Read on to know…

Team of creative geniuses

From researching to strategizing, designing to writing, and planning to executing; a creative agency has experienced professionals working on every aspect of your business. They use their learnings from working with multiple brands to understand the market and create an effective strategy for the business to succeed.

It is cost effective

With a creative agency on board, businesses can get their branding and promotional work done for a fraction of the cost of hiring an entire team of professionals in-house. Think about it. There is a huge expense in acquiring the required tools and softwares. Then there’s the cost of paying salaries to writers, designers, strategists, and consultants. This will drive the cost per lead up through the roof!

Get a fresh perspective

man-with-laptop-cartoon

Sometimes the best way to sustain customer interest and attract a new audience for the brand is by introducing newness; in the brand communication, the product range and the promotional activities.

And this is where a creative agency comes to your rescue. A creative agency in India like Flora Fountain looks at the brand from a neutral perspective, sometimes even from a consumer’s viewpoint. It then identifies the challenges that the brand might be facing. Such as product acceptance, brand communication, the brand’s central idea getting lost or even customer service and feedback.

A creative agency thinks outside the box and comes up with new ideas, and creates innovative solutions to solve problems and delight the target audience.

Saves time

By hiring a creative agency, a business is not just bringing on creative geniuses to work on the brand, but their numerous years of experience working on various brands across different markets catering to all kinds of consumers.

This saves a lot of time in the long run. How, you wonder?

The years spent working on creating successful brands means the agency knows the market in and out. They can anticipate the challenges the business might face, understand the customers’ needs and desires from that market segment and pick the right strategy to counter those challenges and fulfill the customers’ desires.

The amount of time the business would save on research and testing multiple strategies over time in just understanding the audience is invaluable.

puzzel
Efficient management of campaigns

With the backing of a creative agency, a business doesn’t have to worry about involving its in-house marketing team to monitor, analyze, and study the campaigns being run for its promotions. Because a creative agency has the resources, tools, and manpower to run the day-to-day management of the marketing campaigns, analyze its success ratio and work out the next set of plans.

Benefit from their network

Some of the best creative agencies in India are known to have a great network, built through years of experience, recognition and credibility. And in the current times of Instagram, these digital agencies have a great following among netizens too.

So when you work with a creative digital agency in India like Flora Fountain, you get to benefit from their network. Why? Because agencies regularly share the work they have done for brands within their networks too, both offline and online. And that way, your business gets additional exposure to people who follow such full-service agencies.

It’s time to make the right decision for your business, to build it into a brand. It’s time to get the big guns, and hire Ahmedabad’s best digital agency as your creative partners for your offline and online branding and promotions. Get in touch with us for a free consultation session today!

Categories
Branding Services

From business to brand. It’s not just about the logo

Let’s make it bigger.

Can you make it the same but in pink / yellow / blue / green?

Dekh ke maza aana chahiye!

If you have given or received such feedback, you know what we are going to talk about today.

Yes, LOGOS! Every time there’s a conversation around brand building, the first thing that comes to mind after a brand name is the logo.

Discussions over logos notoriously take over branding meetings, leaving precious little for the other crucial aspects of business promotion and advertising. And it’s time to realize that … a brand is more than just its logo. A brand is a living entity that walks, talks, grows and influences the people around it. Wish to know what makes your business a brand? Scroll down!

Your brand must have a PURPOSE

PURPOSE

So, what does your brand deliver? What does it want to be? Who does the brand speak to? Who should sit up and notice the brand? How would your ideal customer describe your brand? If you never asked these questions about your brand, then you must NOW.

For instance, your business might be that of making artisanal chocolates; but what it actually does as a brand is provide joy to the consumer, the experience of enjoying a delicious treat. That is the actual purpose of the said chocolate business.

Similarly, every brand has its purpose, a problem it solves, and questions it provides answers to. By defining this PURPOSE, the mission and vision of your business is formed. And this should be the first step you take in the process of branding, even before you think of a logo.

Your brand has a PERSONALITY

If your brand was a person, who would it be? How would he/she dress, what would be their favourite food, in which language would they talk? These questions help you define a personality for your brand. And when your brand has a personality, it is able to connect with the kind of people it wishes to serve.

So, how do you want your brand to be?

PERSONALITY

Approachable, genuine, validating and emotional, having an impact on the customer every time he/she engages with it.

Basically, MAKE YOUR BRAND HUMAN. To come up with a personality for your brand, you must…

  • First consider the purpose and the message you want to convey.
  • Study your competition and think of what will make your brand stand out from them.
  • Come up with adjectives and phrases that describe your brand, like, Sophisticated yet Rugged, Intellectual but Street Smart, Honest and Friendly.

See what we did there? This is how you define your brand’s personality.

Use VISUALS to convey your brand’s PURPOSE and PERSONALITY

What comes into your mind when you visualize a 3-pointed star inside a circle? Mercedes, right? What comes to your mind when you imagine the colour red? Coca Cola, Ferrari, KFC…. You get the drift.

KFC
mercedes

Once your brand’s purpose and personality is defined, it’s time for strategy on how to convey it to your existing customers, and the ones who could become one in future upon engaging with the brand.

A strong visual element is important for every brand, to leave an imprint on its customer. And for this, you must pick an attractive colour palette, an identifiable font family and graphics that support the brand’s persona. These visual elements like colour are the silent ambassadors of your brand.

Your brand has its own VOICE

Now, this is where the language comes into play. And no, we aren’t just talking about linguistics here. But the conversational style of the brand, the way it speaks to its consumers.

VOICE

The purpose and personality comes into the picture here again, as they decide the style in which the brand will talk. Is your business providing facts to its end user? Then the tone of the brand is going to be informative and very formal, like Encyclopedia Britannica.

But at the same time, a brand named Diply Facts on Instagram does the same thing, but its language is polar opposite to Britannica. Why? The audience, their age groups and the purpose behind the end product is different from each other.

While the former is used by students, academicians and writers for educational purposes, the latter is used by a younger, casual audience for informal activities like sharing with friends on social media.

Now that you know that building a brand goes much beyond creating a logo, simply hiring a graphic design or logo design company to create one is not enough. You need a creative agency that specializes in branding. Wondering where to find one? Click here to get in touch and start a conversation with us at Flora Fountain!

Categories
Social Media

Get’em Hooked With Videos: Types of video content you must try for digital marketing

digital marketing
Fact 1: Close to 300 hours worth of video content is created and published on YouTube every
minute.
Fact 2: Facebook clocks over 4 billion video views on its platform every day.
Fact 3: Over 70% consumers prefer learning about a product or service via a video than text.The reason we’re dropping these mind blowing facts right at the start is to let you know how important video content has become for marketing in just a decade.Earlier, consumption of video content was a luxury of sorts, as it required one to have a strong internet connection and a streaming device of higher quality. But with smartphones becoming cheap and data cheaper, the addition to the consumer base has been massive, something which brands and service providers have to take a note of and create content accordingly. Here’s a look at the types of video content you can create to market your products/service digitally and reach out to large swathes of people online.

1. Testimonials

One of the best ways to convince the viewer that your product or service is the best, is by getting the good word out through true user testimonials. While people still “write” reviews, brands have now got their happy customers to provide them with a video review, a testimonial where they talk about their experience with the brand or the product and why they’d recommend it to others too.

When we see a real person talk to us about anything, we tend to believe more. So brand marketers must include this in their video marketing strategy for social media.

brand

2. Tutorials

(Guiding the viewer on how-to, whether is it using a product, learning a workout or how to bake) Engagement with the viewer is one of the best ways to reach out and promote one’s services to them. And tutorials are the perfect way to get people hooked and eventually convert them into paying customers.

When a viewer gets value from the video content it consumes from a brand, like hacks on how to use their product better, easy to do workouts from home (PS: they were a rage during the lockdowns last year) or tips on how to bake a cake at home, its loyalty to the brand increases and it develops a feeling of obligation towards to the brand that they must purchase their product/services for higher sense of satisfaction.

3. BTS

Everyone loves a juicy gossip. And BTS, or Behind The Scenes videos are kinda the same thing which brands can create, to deepen their connect with the viewer/consumer. A BTS is always published after the actual content is published and promoted. A BTS is a way of giving the viewers a sneak peek into what went behind the curtains in creating the video which they loved. While influencers usually post their unseen BTS videos shot using their personal devices, nowadays brands too create special BTS footage, as apart of their video promotion plan.

brand

4. Unboxing

Oh, the joy of unwrapping the brand new mobile phone you ordered last week and got delivered today, it’s unmatchable. It gives us a different level of serotonin rush when when we unbox something we’ve been long waiting for. And brand marketeers have understood and begun exploiting this feeling among us to sell us their products through well shot unboxing videos.

There’s no rocket science behind it. It’s simply someone opening a box of, say, cookies, or a brand new laptop from its packaging. But when one sees it, it develops a feeling within them to experience it for real, which eventually triggers and pushes us to order it. A simple search on YouTube or Instagram for unboxing or unwrapping videos will throw up thousands of such videos, but beware, by the end of it, your wallet might get a little lighter.

5. LIVE

Ever since the the livestreaming feature was launched by Facebook for both Facebook and Instagram in India in 2016, people have lapped it up and have been having fun with it, giving their friends and followers a sneak-peek into their lives.

So brands too didn’t let go of the opportunity. Live gives the brands a human form. So far, consumers would identify a brand through its logos and products.

brand

But with the Live feature, brands can use their Instagram, Facebook or YouTube channels to introduce the people behind it and as a result it makes it more human.

There are many ways to use the Live Video feature creatively. You can live stream the launch of a new product or service, you can have a live interactive session with your followers who can ask you questions in real time and get them answered. Or even do an unboxing session live (yeah, we know it’s a great idea, thank us later).

With so many ways to use videos as your tool to promote your services and products on social media, it’s time you pick up that camera, put on your filmmaker’s hat amd go nuts with videos.

Check out some of the cool video content we at Flora Fountain create for ourselves and our brands here.